A recap of the QualitaX webinar featuring Stefan Rind, Founder and CEO of BrickMark
Real estate has always been one of the world’s most valuable asset classes and one of its least accessible. High minimum investment thresholds, illiquid secondary markets, opaque pricing, and operational complexity have historically confined institutional-grade real estate to institutional-grade investors. Tokenization is changing that — not as a theoretical future possibility but as a live, operational reality. In a recent QualitaX webinar, Stefan Rind, founder and CEO of BrickMark, joined us to share what six years of building in this space has taught him, and why the market is finally beginning to move at scale.
BrickMark: Six Years at the Frontier of Real Estate Tokenization
Stefan came to blockchain from a background most tokenization founders lack: ten years as CEO of Colonia Real Estate, a publicly listed German company managing approximately €4 billion of residential assets. That operational grounding — understanding cash flows, structuring securities, working with institutional investors and regulators — shaped how BrickMark was built from the outset.
Founded in 2018, BrickMark completed what remains the largest single commercial property tokenization in the world: the Bahnhofstrasse 52 building in Zurich, completed in 2020. Since then the company has processed over €166 million in property-related tokenization transaction volumes, built a pipeline of over €1 billion for the next twelve months, and registered 25,000 investors on its platform.
Stefan’s framing of tokenization’s historical place is instructive. In the early 2000s, securitization — packaging real estate assets into capital market securities — transformed how the industry was financed, opening new funding channels regardless of individual credit ratings. Tokenization, he argues, is the next equivalent step: a structural evolution in how real estate capital is raised, distributed, and traded.
Why Now? The Infrastructure That Finally Exists
The honest answer to why tokenization of real estate is accelerating now, when the concept has existed for years, is that the enabling infrastructure has only recently arrived.
Regulatory frameworks were the critical missing piece. Switzerland enacted DLT legislation in 2021, giving legal clarity on transferability, custody rights, and the status of digital securities under Swiss law. Liechtenstein moved at a similar pace. Germany has progressively expanded what can be tokenized — bonds and funds first, with shares now in early pilot phase. The EU’s MiCA framework, while still being implemented, is creating a baseline across European markets. The UK is developing parallel rules. Outside Europe, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are actively building regulatory infrastructure for digital securities, and India has recently opened the door to tokenization pilot projects for the first time.
Regulated digital exchanges were equally important. The SDX (Swiss Digital Exchange), operated by the Swiss stock exchange group SIX, provides a fully regulated venue for the issuance, trading, and settlement of digital securities. Without an exchange that can list a €30–50 million digital security within a proper regulatory framework, tokenization remained a private placement tool with limited reach. SDX changed that — and Tokyo Stock Exchange, ASX in Australia, and Hong Kong are now developing their own digital securities capabilities.
Institutional commitment has shifted the narrative decisively. BlackRock’s Larry Fink has publicly framed tokenization as the next evolution of capital markets. Citi Group research projects tokenized assets reaching into the trillions by the early 2030s. HSBC, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and others are running live pilots. The question is no longer whether this will happen, but how quickly.
The Benefits: For Asset Owners, Investors, and the Market
Stefan walked through the value proposition across the key stakeholders, drawing on a McKinsey framework he uses with clients:
For asset owners, tokenization delivers improved capital efficiency — new ways to raise financing on existing assets, fractional exit strategies, and access to a global investor base without the cost and complexity of a traditional public offering. An asset owner can issue debt tokens or mezzanine tokens against an existing property to raise additional capital without full disposal.
For investors, the most significant change is democratisation of access. Assets that previously required seven-figure minimum investments can now be accessed from €100 or CHF 100. Daily liquidity on previously illiquid assets, transparent real-time pricing, and 24/7 portfolio visibility are all structural improvements over the traditional model.
For operational efficiency, the elimination of intermediary layers — sub-custodians, transfer agents, reconciliation processes — represents meaningful cost reduction across the issuance, settlement, and lifecycle management of real estate securities.
On ESG, Stefan made a point worth highlighting. Green bonds are in growing demand from institutional investors with minimum ESG allocation requirements, but qualifying product is in short supply. Tokenization enhances a green bond’s ESG credentials across all three dimensions: environmental (the underlying asset’s sustainability credentials), social (fractionalisation opens investment to a vastly broader population), and governance (public blockchain records all transactions immutably from issuance onwards, providing a level of transparency that traditional structures cannot match).
How the BrickMark Platform Works
BrickMark’s core product is the BrickGate platform — now in its third generation — which functions as a modular, end-to-end tokenization infrastructure for property owners who want to become issuers of digital securities.
The platform covers the full issuance lifecycle:
Initiation: Structuring the asset, conducting due diligence, analysing cash flows, and deciding the form of the token — equity shares, debt tokens, or mezzanine instruments. BrickMark works with legal advisers (including PWC and other firms with digital asset expertise) to structure the offering correctly for the target jurisdiction.
Configuration and tokenization: Smart contract development and deployment, with the issuer choosing the blockchain (primarily Ethereum, but Polygon and Stellar are also supported — the platform is blockchain-agnostic). Once tokens are minted, investors can hold them in self-custody wallets like MetaMask or through institutional custody solutions via Fireblocks or MetaKo.
Operational lifecycle: Dividend payments, interest payments, voting rights management, token burning on redemption, and real-time cap table visibility for issuers. The issuer dashboard shows, in real time, which investors hold which positions across all issued tokens.
Distribution: Three channels are available. Direct placement (for issuers with existing networks), broker-dealer platforms (BrickMark has signed agreements with four including T+0 in the US and a Singapore partner), and regulated exchange listing on SDX or the forthcoming BX Swiss (the Berne Stock Exchange’s digital platform, awaiting FINMA approval).
The SDX model Stefan described is worth particular attention for institutional readers: investors can subscribe to a digital bond on SDX in either digital or traditional form, and can switch between the two at any time during the bond’s lifetime. A pension fund without digital infrastructure today can invest in traditional form, build its capabilities, and migrate to digital later — or vice versa. There is no forced migration, no all-or-nothing commitment. Stefan expects the digital tranche to represent 30–40% of issuances in the near term, rising to 80–90% within five to ten years.
Live Case Studies: From Zurich to Westminster
Bahnhofstrasse 52, Zurich
The landmark proof-of-concept, completed in 2020, remains the largest single commercial building ever tokenized. It demonstrated that the model works operationally, legally, and commercially — and provided the blueprint for everything that followed.
Westminster, London
A prominent property adjacent to the Houses of Parliament is in the process of being tokenized. The issuer is offering a subordinated note on the building, which will operate as a short-term rental property under a well-known hotel brand. The structure offers a 7% annual coupon and an anticipated return of over 11% per annum over a five-year horizon.
SDX Digital Bonds
UBS issued a significant digital bond on SDX in November 2022. The cities of Lugano, Basel, and Zurich followed, with Basel and Zurich each issuing CHF 100 million in December 2023 — the first transaction worldwide using official wholesale CBDC (Swiss National Bank digital currency) for settlement. Stefan expects SDX to reach CHF 1 billion in tokenized securities volume within the next twelve months.
Regulation: Progress, Patchwork, and Practical Navigation
The regulatory landscape remains genuinely complex, and Stefan was candid about the journey. When BrickMark tokenized Bahnhofstrasse 52 in 2020, the Swiss regulator took six months to respond to some queries — the infrastructure for processing these requests simply did not exist. That has changed substantially.
Switzerland and Liechtenstein are the gold standard in Europe: DLT laws in place, clear legal frameworks for digital securities, and a regulated exchange (SDX) already operating. An issuer operating under Swiss law has near-complete legal certainty.
Germany is catching up. Until recently, only bonds and funds could be tokenized. Shares are now entering pilot phase. Germany’s Electronic Securities Act (eWpG) is creating a workable framework, but harmonisation with MiCA at the EU level remains incomplete.
The EU broadly: MiCA provides a framework, but national implementations diverge. Stefan is actively involved in Germany’s blockchain initiative to help harmonise technical and legal definitions across jurisdictions.
The United States: The SEC remains cautious, but Regulation A+ allows digital securities issuances of up to $75 million including retail investors. Stefan’s practical advice for US market entry: position the token explicitly as a security from the outset, engage with SEC rules directly, and avoid any strategy designed to circumvent securities law. The companies that have created regulatory problems in the US are overwhelmingly those that tried to argue their token was not a security.
UAE and Dubai: Stefan was visiting the following week. His assessment: the UAE moves fast when it commits to something, the infrastructure is being built with access to serious capital, and a regulated digital exchange is likely within twelve to fifteen months. He sees significant catch-up potential for real-world asset tokenization in the Gulf region over the next two to three years.
Token Standards: ERC-20, ERC-3643, and Platform Agnosticism
On the question of which token standards BrickMark uses, Stefan was pragmatic: the platform supports what clients need. ERC-20 remains the baseline for simpler structures. ERC-3643 — the permissioned token standard developed by Tokeny — is an option BrickMark has implemented and actively recommends for regulated securities, given its built-in compliance controls. The platform is also open to newer standards as they emerge and demonstrate adoption.
Stefan’s broader view on standards aligns with QualitaX’s own work: the industry needs more transparency, standardisation, and the ability to track tokenization activity by asset class and issuer type across permissionless networks. That infrastructure — reporting standards, on-chain registries, industry-wide data visibility — is one of the important unsexy requirements that will determine how efficiently the market scales.
DeFi, AMMs, and the Future Market Structure
One of the most forward-looking exchanges in the conversation concerned the trajectory towards decentralised finance and automated market makers. Stefan’s view: he is a genuine believer in decentralised exchanges like Uniswap, and he estimates that tokenized real estate assets landing on compliant DeFi protocols is a two-to-four year horizon — not a decade away.
His vision of the future market structure is nuanced and worth capturing precisely:
Institutional investors — insurance companies, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds — will operate in regulated, centralised digital environments, not because they are sceptical of DeFi but because their regulatory obligations give them no choice. The trillions of dollars currently locked in traditional financial systems will migrate to centralised digital infrastructure before they can ever reach decentralised protocols.
Individual and retail investors will have access to a growing decentralised market alongside the regulated one.
The end state — perhaps twenty or thirty years out — is a borderless investment universe where individuals and institutions alike can choose from a diverse range of asset classes, geographies, and structures in ways that have simply never been possible before. Stefan sees both worlds coexisting and reinforcing each other, rather than one displacing the other.
Key Takeaways
- BrickMark is six years operational with €166 million in transaction volume and a €1 billion pipeline — this is a live business, not a roadmap
- The infrastructure bottleneck has been resolved: regulated exchanges (SDX, BX Swiss), DLT legislation in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and expanding frameworks across Europe and the UAE have removed the barriers that stalled the market’s early development
- The SDX hybrid model — allowing investors to switch between digital and traditional form at any time — is the pragmatic path for institutional adoption without forcing infrastructure upgrades
- BrickGate provides end-to-end issuance infrastructure including KYC/AML, blockchain-agnostic tokenization (Ethereum, Polygon, Stellar), custody integration (Fireblocks, MetaKo), and lifecycle management
- Regulatory navigation requires treating digital securities as securities from the outset — in every jurisdiction, the firms creating problems are those that tried to circumvent securities law, not those that engaged with it directly
- ERC-3643 is the recommended standard for regulated securities with compliance requirements; BrickMark is blockchain and standard agnostic but gives clear guidance
- Compliant DeFi is a two-to-four year reality, not a distant prospect — Stefan sees regulated AMM integration as imminent
- The long-term vision is a borderless investment universe accessible to both institutional and retail investors — with tokenization as the infrastructure layer that makes it possible.